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Thursday, May 25, 2017

Today 25th
May 2o17 is Vaikasi Amavasai. Moon
attracts ~ it waxes and wanes, can it be
wonderful and biggest on a day when it is not to be seen ?

In astronomy, new
moon is the first phase of the Moon, when it orbits are not seen from the Earth; the moment when the Moon and the Sun have the
same ecliptical longitude. The Moon is
not visible at this time except when it
is seen in silhouette during a solar eclipse when it is illuminated by
earthshine. A lunation or synodic month
is the mean (average) time from one new moon to the next. The average length of
a lunation is 29.530588 days (or 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 3 seconds).

In recent years, the
year’s largest supermoon has been a full moon. But not in 2017. The moon is new today, on May 25, and it’ll swing to lunar perigee –
and be closest to Earth for all of 2017 – about a quarter day later. Earthsky.org writes that there is no
comparably close alignment of a full moon with lunar perigee this year. So –
for the first time since the year 2009 – it’ll be a new moon (not a full moon)
that presents the year’s closest and largest supermoon.

We say “largest”
despite the fact that we won’t see this moon. We can’t see it because every new
moon travels across the sky with the sun during the day. Astronomers sometimes call the year’s nearest
perigee moon a proxigee moon. The 2017 proxigee, or closest perigee, moon will
lie 357,207 km (221,958 miles) away. That gives 2017 another first since 2009.
It’ll be the first time since 2009 that the centers of the Earth and moon will
not come closer than 357,000 km (221,830 miles).